Hill People: Appalachian Culture and the American State

21 Pages·2008·0.33 MB·English

by  Sara Gregg

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“Hill People: Appalachian Culture and the American State”
Introduction to Cultivated Country: Subsistence Farms, the New Deal, and the
Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia

Home of Fannie Corbin, Shenandoah National Park, October 1935
Library of Congress, # LC-USF33- 002167-M2

This scene of a mountain farm, which was replicated thousands of times up and down the
Appalachian chain, was selected by New Deal photographer Arthur Rothstein as evocative of the
mountain way of life—of its hardscrabble setting and its peripheral beauty. The family in this
photograph represents the more than 150,000 farmers who eked a subsistence out of the rocky soils
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of the Appalachian Mountains in the early twentieth century.1 Transitional decades preceded this
1936 photograph, during a period when economic depression, erosion and drought, and government
policies all combined to threaten the already tenuous hold of these farmers on their land. In some
areas, these forces brought the mountain way of life to an end, transforming stretches of the
Appalachians from a vernacular agrarian landscape to a federally managed forest landscape.
Cultivated Country tells the story of that conversion in two areas, the northern Blue Ridge Mountains
of Virginia, which were organized into the Shenandoah National Park, and the Green Mountains of
Vermont, parts of which were set aside as the Green Mountain National Forest.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when most Americans look at the forested lands of
the Appalachian Mountains, few visual reminders remain of those households that populated the
mountains a century ago, and so current visitors envision a landscape with a long and uncomplicated
history. The dense forests appear untouched, save by the occasional mountain resort or ski area,
and much of the region is dedicated to recreation and forestry. Celebrated as a national treasure,
these mountains are a safety valve for the populous cities and suburbs of the Eastern Seaboard, and
today, the Blue Ridge and Green Mountains are tourist meccas, offering rugged beauty and solitude
within an easy drive of some of the nation’s largest cities. The eastern mountains serve as an
exemplar of how conservation policies have been implemented in the United States, and a reminder
of the compromises that have been effected in order to open public access to natural areas.
During the middle decades of the twentieth century—because of a conjuncture of reformist
ideology, economic conditions, and government expansion—the Appalachian landscape re-assumed
a primeval aspect. Consequently, the twentieth-century history of these mountains demands a

1 The number of subsistence farms was placed at 150,659 according to the census report released on
1 April 1930. The source of this figure is one of the definitive studies of mountain life, published by
the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern
Appalachians, miscellaneous publication no. 205 (Washington: USDA, 1935), 46.
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deeper look beneath the sylvan façade. It is worth revisiting how, and why, the Appalachian
Mountains of Virginia and Vermont became a recreational escape for American tourists and hikers.
A great shift in land use in Appalachia occurred between the 1910s and the 1930s, as large swaths of
the mountains were placed under federal management and farms and private forests were converted
to public lands. The evolution of conservation planning in Appalachia redefined national land use
planning, and the creation of national parks and forests in the East is partially a tale of losers and
winners: those who had to give up their land for the larger national cause, and those who benefited
from newfound access to the mountains. By the end of the century, the result of these land use
changes was the reforestation of the eastern mountains.
The complexity of these mountain landscapes is matched by their history. The early
twentieth century was rife with tensions between outsiders’ promotion of conservation and land use
reform and localism, and the regulation of land use provided a particularly acute point of conflict
between local people and federal officials. During the 1920s and 1930s a local vision of Appalachia
as a forested commons came into conflict with Progressive plans for expert management and land
use reform, and the debate over the future of the mountain landscape reintroduced many of the
issues first raised about government conservation policy in the late nineteenth century.
The dramatic realignments of the New Deal era are well known, and yet their precedents
have been largely ignored. This book focuses on the antecedents of New Deal planning during the
1910s and 1920s, and the lessons that New Dealers took from them. In spite of the profound
impact of the Depression and New Deal on American society, it is a principal contention of this
book that the conservation programs for which the New Deal is famous are better understood as
the culmination of drastic changes in land use that were already underway by the 1920s. New Deal
initiatives and funding helped to restructure the American landscape, but this book is based upon
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the argument that the most visionary federal conservation programs of the 1930s were solidly rooted
in the research, programs, and policy debates of the 1910s and 1920s.
Cultivated Country refocuses attention on the influence of land use planning of the early
twentieth century, and three principal arguments drive its structure. First, during the 1910s and
1920s, the federal government assumed a new objective—the conservation of private land through
its reacquisition by the federal government. Congress’ decision to return private land to the public
domain represents a dramatic break with centuries of American precedent, and the 1911 Weeks Act
created new national forests, thus preparing the way for a paradigm shift in federal and state policies
that has reshaped the American landscape. The consequences of this change were particularly clear
in Appalachia: the transformation of small, subsistence farms into federally managed forests and
recreation areas had a measurable ecological impact on the natural landscape. The implementation
of this policy highlights some of the earliest environmental consequences of state planning, as well
as the expansion of government through a new approach to land management.
Second, New Deal planning had its roots in the conservation ideas of the Progressive Era, as
many scholars have observed. However, far more important, and less acknowledged, is the
precedent that the land use planners during the 1910s and 1920s had established for those New Deal
conservation programs that have long been celebrated as the first of their kind. While
conservationism in the early twentieth century is widely acknowledged, scholars have devoted less
attention to the development of recreation areas during the 1920s, particularly in regions like
Appalachia that were easily accessible to urban areas. The recreation and conservation initiatives of
the 1910s and 1920s are the predecessors of the land use programs of the New Deal. Because of
these early-twentieth-century land acquisition and recreation planning at both the state and federal
levels, New Dealers had models of how to manage ambitious conservation projects. While local
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antecedents did not ensure federal success, the history of land use planning in many areas did
smooth the way for receptiveness toward many New Deal initiatives.
Third, the success of the New Deal was affected by local responses to federal initiatives, just
as much as by the better-chronicled clashes between liberals and conservatives in Congress. Local
reactions to federal land policy were intimately linked to the legacy of land use planning in the
preceding decades, and this history had itself been conditioned by regional political culture. As plans
for federal recreation and conservation areas proliferated, the people threatened with displacement
to create parks responded—addressing their complaints to state officials, federal agents, the
President, and the Supreme Court. While some of these protests resonated at the highest levels of
power, many others went unheeded, and the impact of political pressure on both environmental
management and land use planning is an important component of the history of these regions. In
Appalachia, the structural differences between town and county management had a particular impact
on how constituents reacted to government at all levels. Towns tended to demand greater citizen
participation, while counties maintained a more hierarchical approach to government. The
divergence between democratic involvement at the township and county levels had a measurable
effect on public responses to federal land use planning. In sum, the tradition of government
influence within mountain communities proved determinative in affecting the claim of local
residents to a say in how change was implemented in their communities.
Federal land use planning and conservation policy led to fundamental changes in the
approach of government to private lands, and, by extension, the rights of the American public. The
transition from subsistence landscapes to federally managed public spaces reflects the intersection of
Progressive-Era planners' ambitions to promote recreation and consumption with conservationists'
efforts to monitor forest protection and production. By examining the negotiations over land use
within the eastern forests, and their outcomes, this book demonstrates that the impact of policy
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decisions altered both the American environment and those communities that shared the mountain
landscape.

A Place Apart
The Appalachian Mountains were one of the first American frontiers, and they remained on
the margins of national culture and economic relations into the twentieth century. The range
stretches from northern Alabama into Quebec, and encompasses a diversity of mountain landscapes.
The Northern and Southern Appalachians are rarely considered together, and yet the Blue Ridge
Mountains of Virginia in central Appalachia, and the Green Mountains of Vermont, in the region’s
northern reaches, share a number of characteristics. Like most of the range, they boast a moderately
rugged terrain, have historically been covered in forest and are ideally suited to growing trees, they
have proved viable for small-scale farming and husbandry, and they are located in close proximity to
important agricultural areas. In the early twentieth century the mountains of each state remained
largely detached from the expanding regional markets, and yet regional road networks and rail lines
bisected their ranges. In sum, these were geographically and economically similar areas that
contained a diversity of households—much like the rest of rural America in the early decades of the
twentieth century. Each was, however, easily caricatured by visitors and the press, and came to
represent in the public imagination a particular, bygone, and unsustainable way of life. These
caricatures developed into a critical component of the rhetoric of poverty and backwardness that
eventually facilitated the transformation of private property into federal lands.
In Virginia and Vermont, and throughout Appalachia, local people recognized that the
mountains were a dynamic landscape—where shifting resource uses and malleable boundaries meant
that the local economy was constantly adapting to environmental conditions. The local dynamics
within these communities belie the distortions often perpetrated by outsiders, and by revisiting the
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history of local communities this book reinterprets their environmental impact on the mountain
landscape, as well as the disjunction between local uses and the perceptions of visitors to the region.
The mountain environment has always been its own force, not least during the development of
plans for Appalachian land reform. A critical reevaluation of local ecology and land use practices
allows for a more complex understanding of both the environmental and economic challenges that
faced residents and policymakers, as well as the motivations that led to the push for government
oversight of local land policy. The policy developments of the 1920s and 1930s had an impact that
reached far beyond the nation-state, however, and the environmental impacts of the new purview of
government reshaped the Appalachian landscape. This book builds upon the foundation of a
“hidden history” of American conservation, rooted in the opposition of local people to the
institutionalization of an externally-conceived system of land use and land management.2
Appalachia is more diverse than simply the coal fields of West Virginia or the rugged White
Mountains of New Hampshire. Consequently, this study moves beyond the industrial and
recreational enclaves of the mountains and into the agricultural countryside that sustained the
region’s population in the centuries before industrialization. While some sections of Appalachia had
been ravaged by natural resource extraction during the late nineteenth century, others, including
northwestern Virginia and Vermont, remained largely untouched by industrial forces. Even in the
early twentieth century, the majority of the Appalachian region remained in small farms, and the
mountains of the northern Blue Ridge of Virginia and the Green Mountains of Vermont remained
primarily devoted to agriculture. These areas were not part of an extraction-dependent economy in
which outside landowners exercised a dominant influence on land use decisions and, thus did not

2 Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American
Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the
Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999): Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
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fulfill the preconditions for a colonial economy like those described by many Appalachian scholars. 3
The most influential surveys of Appalachian development document a transition toward capitalism
dependent on outside capital during the early twentieth century, with an accompanying waning in
self-sufficiency, this evolution did not occur equally throughout the region.4 In fact, land use in the
1920s in Virginia and Vermont looked similar to that in the 1880s, with all of the attendant
advantages and disadvantages.
Appalachia has long been held up as a symbol of independence, challenge, and rugged
survival. The region was re-discovered by folklorists and vacationers as a repository of folk culture
in the late nineteenth century, and thereafter it was reinvented as a landscape of leisure, through a
combination of private ventures and, later, with state and federal sponsorship. To a new class of
tourists, the temperate Appalachian range appeared an ideal site for the expansion of national
recreation lands. The twentieth century expansion of regional road networks finally domesticated
these mountains; after having been bypassed by roads and railroads for over a century, they were
increasingly tamed by the automobile and turned into a vacationer’s retreat. Initially, the moderate
mountain summers lured urban elites into their cool hollows and coves, and by the early 1920s the
federal government started to take the initiative to expand access into mountain areas for all
Americans. The democratization of recreation extended quickly into the Appalachian Mountains,
which offered accessible, low-cost vacations for people from the eastern cities. The population

3 See, for example, Paul Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region's Economic
History, 1730-1940 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Ronald D. Eller, Miners,
Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee, 1982); Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and more recently Ken Fones-Wolf, Glass Houses:
Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890s-1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2007).
4 The literature on the market revolution is significant for this project, as many of the cycles that
nineteenth century studies identify are visible in the developing economies of Appalachia during the
twentieth century. Critical among these is Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway’s edited volume The
Market Revolution in America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
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explosion in eastern cities led federal policymakers to search out safety valves that might distribute
social pressures during the hot and volatile summer months.
Expanding the national domain into the East required that the United States government
reframe its approach to property and land management, and federal agencies undertook a new role
as land purchasers and conservationists. These new federal initiatives were spearheaded by a cohort
of professionals who sought to put order into the American system, harkening a period of intensive
experimentation in agriculture, conservation, and reform. Policymakers envisioned the most
productive distribution of resources and energies for the entire nation, and during the early
twentieth century researchers expert in agricultural economics, rural sociology, geography, and
forestry were deployed to bolster nascent conservation policies.
Appalachia became a laboratory for federal planners during the 1910s and 1920s, as experts
deployed an innovative planning apparatus, ideas about social uplift, and focus on conservation and
preservation. The first stage of federal intervention in the region began in the forests, where the
perennial potential for over harvesting and destruction meant that these areas increasingly attracted
the attention of conservationists and land use planners. Because there was no formal regulation of
forestry on private lands, and no avenue for federal forestry experts to offer assistance to private
landowners, the first step toward forest protection occurred with the passage of the 1911 Weeks Act
enabling the creation of new eastern national forests. Federal decisions to begin reacquiring private
land and regulating land use were rooted in Progressive Era ideas about efficiency, best use, and the
value of public improvements. With the expanding federal focus on regulation and management,
and the development of a new class of experts who could direct federal efforts, the groundwork was
laid for the establishment of a new land use program in the eastern mountains.
As federal officials took additional responsibility for national affairs during the 1920s and
1930s, government began to assert an unprecedented influence on the economic and political
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landscapes of the Blue Ridge and Green Mountains. Federal planners sought to stabilize mountain
economies by moderating the effects of depopulation in some areas; of overpopulation in others;
and addressing the economic dislocation that had come to characterize both local communities and
their people. Beginning in the early 1910s, foresters spread out to assess the health of the
Appalachian woodlands, while agricultural economists deployed their expertise in order to analyze
the viability of mountain farms. Social reformers and local boosters joined together in the early
1920s to investigate conditions in the mountains, spurred on by what they saw as a social and
economic declension that they feared would continue to spread. The efforts of these disparate
groups culminated in the late 1920s when local and state governments initiated new collaborations
with federal agencies in an ambitious plan to preserve wide swaths of the mountain forests. The
grandiose scale of plans for the mountains caused the eruption of a series of conflicts over local and
federal power, as local people and federal planners disagreed over the prioritization of public over
private property, and this period of state transformation did not pass unchallenged.
The transitional decades of the early twentieth century generated a new cadre of experts
working to reform American society, the expansion of a national state that embraced innovation and
efficiency, and the emergence of an economically intertwined civil society that allowed for the state
to enter a new phase of influence in the daily life of its citizens.5 This confluence of events swept
the Appalachian Mountains—which had long remained apart from the economic, political, and
transportation infrastructures of the nation—into the orbit of national life in an unprecedented way.
In the process, the tension between the locals’ vision of the mountains as an open commons and the
planners’ ethos of conservation and reform ricocheted across the region, and the conflicts that
emerged in the 1920s over local autonomy and power continues to resonate in many areas of
Appalachia today.

5 Scott, 2, 5.